Luc Anselin - Life and Contributions

Life and Contributions

Luc Anselin is currently Regents' Professor, Walter Isard Chair and Director of the School of Geographical Sciences and Urban Planning (ASU) where he attracted some of the leading spatial econometrics scholars. He also founded and directs the GeoDa Center for Geospatial Analysis and Computation at ASU to develop, implement, apply, and disseminate spatial analysis methods. He held prior appointments at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, University of Texas at Dallas, West Virginia University, the University of California, Santa Barbara and the Ohio State University. His (joint) appointments included a range of disciplines, including geography, Urban and Regional Planning, Economics, Agricultural and Consumer Economics, Political Economy and Political Science.

In recent years, several national and international awards recognized Luc Anselin's lifetime achievements, including his development of new spatial methodologies (e.g., local indicators of statistical association) and his widely adopted spatial software tools. The Regional Science Association International elected him as Fellow in 2004, and awarded him their Walter Isard Prize in 2005 and their William Alonso Memorial Prize in 2006. In 2008, Luc Anselin was awarded one of the nation's highest academic honors by being elected to the National Academy of Sciences as well as to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2012, Luc Anselin was elected as a University Consortium for Geographic Information Science (UCGIS) Fellow.

2008 marked the 20th anniversary of the book "Spatial Econometrics: Methods and Models" that Luc Anselin is best known for and that has been cited over 6,000 times. One of the principal academic achievements of Dr. Anselin has been his contributions to moving the discipline of spatial econometrics from the margins in 1988 to current acceptance in mainstream econometrics, thereby advancing the econometric foundations of Geographic Information Science. His publications include several hundred articles and seminal edited books (including New Directions in Spatial Econometrics in 1995 and Advances in Spatial Econometrics in 2004) in the fields of Quantitative Geography, Regional Science, GIScience, Econometrics, Economics and Computer Science.

His development of spatial software further facilitated the establishment of spatial econometrics. Prominent software tools include SpaceStat (spatial econometrics), GeoDa (exploratory spatial data analysis and spatial regression modeling), and collaborative efforts such as PySAL, an open source library of spatial analytic functions based on the Python programming language. The increased popularity of spatial analysis methods is illustrated by GeoDa's worldwide adoption by over 56,000 users within six years of its creation.

A native of Belgium, Luc Anselin graduated magna cum laude with a B.S. in economics in 1975 and summa cum laude with an M.S. in Statistics, Econometrics and Operations in 1976, both from the Vrije Universiteit Brussel. Around this time, the origins of spatial econometrics began to take shape in economics departments in the Netherlands and geography/regional science departments in the UK. In 1977, he moved from Belgium to the U.S. to enroll in Cornell University's interdisciplinary doctoral program in regional science. This provided the opportunity to work with Walter Isard, one of the founders of regional science in the US, and William Greene, author of the standard textbook in econometrics. He earned his doctorate in regional science in 1980.